(You know we mean it because we have a nice shiny "contact us" button)
Conversion rate optimization (CRO) can be compared to shopping. When users are surfing the Internet, they are looking to “buy” something. Whether they’re buying amusement, information, or an actual product, they’ve arrived at your website in hopes of making that purchase. These purchases are known as “conversions.” Conversion rate optimization, CRO, is the act of refining your website to maximize purchases.
Conversions are the goal of every website. Yes, every website. Whether it’s a law firm getting sparse leads or an online retailer with a bloated inventory, conversions make or break your site.
Recently, we redesigned a client’s website to optimize his conversion rate. He saw an immediate 800% increase in leads, which immediately boosted sales and a fat return on investment. Conversion really is the point of having a website.
Here are 6 ways to improve it:
1. Design a site that demonstrates credibility
We live in a world where people make decisions more and more on the aesthetic appeal of the product than ever before. With a few hundred million websites online, your competition is a tad steep. Don’t skimp on the design of your website. A first impression only happens once.
Navigation should be simple and straightforward. Don’t make your users think. The process should be smooth and effortless.
“Reading Gravity” is critical to CRO. In the western world, users subconsciously look to the top left of the page first, then across and down. Learn more about the reading gravity and place buttons and calls to action in the line of fire.
When possible, use reputable logos. If you’re shipping a product, add the logo of your shipping company. If you accept credit cards and have a SSL, place those logos in a visible position on your page. They send a message of security and site integrity.
2. Utilize a simple call to action on every page of your site
For some sites this call to action is an Add to Cart button, for service-based sites, usually a simple form or invitation to subscribe to an e-newsletter. Users know you want their business and aren’t surprised that you’re asking for them to buy something or contact them. Keep the forms as short as possible to maximize your CRO. Only require the fields you absolutely need. The easier you make it for the user to purchase your product or service, the more likely they’ll follow through. Imagine the laziest person on earth and optimize your site for him or her.
3. Implement SEO tactics
Novels can (and have) been written on this topic, but there are a few critical elements that must be considered to improve your CRO. The purpose of SEO is to increase the traffic to your website, and the increase of qualified traffic can lend to an increase of conversions. Thus, SEO can’t be ignored if you want to generate profits or visibility online. Here are a few questions to ask your SEO consultant or agency:
a. How do I write SEO-friendly headlines and content?
b. What is the best way to generate inbound links to my site?
c. Is my site’s code optimized for search engines (h1 tags, 301 redirect, etc.)?
d. Would my product or service benefit from pay per click campaigns?
e. What ongoing tactics can I do to keep my SEO alive and kickin’?
4. Create service or product specific landing pages
Landing pages are a stellar way to drive more qualified leads to specific pages on your site. If you sell books, toys, and board games on your site and try to optimize your homepage for those three categories, your success and credibility to a user searching specifically for a book has been decreased significantly. If you set up an optimized landing page that focuses completely on books, however, you can drive qualified traffic to that page and maximize your conversions.
5. Offer something of value!
To maximize your CRO, offer your visitors something that could benefit them. If you are a law firm, offer your first consultation for free. If you sell an energy drink, send them a free sample in exchange for their contact information. Most users are willing to hand over their contact information in exchange for something free. Analyze your return on investment and tweak your offering until you find the “sweet spot.”
6. Test, test, test
CRO is all about tweaking and testing until you find the most effective combination. Remember, the following can all drastically affect your conversions:
a. The overall design of your site
b. The message of your headlines
c. The placement of your calls to action
d. The length of your copy
e. The fields required in your contact form
f. The SEO tactics used (or lack thereof)
Since users are constantly adapting to online conversion tactics, so must you. Testing should be an ongoing process as long as your website exists.
Conversions will indeed make or break the success of your website. Whether you have an existing website or haven’t built it yet, make sure your web designer or agency understands these points and implements them.
Net neutrality is one of the biggest issues to be debated on the future of Internet use and digital communications in America, but most people don’t know anything about it. Unfortunately, that doesn’t surprise me. What does surprise me, however, is the lack of outrage coming from the search engine optimization and Internet marketing crowd. They should all be freaking out about this.
If you don’t know about the raging net neutrality debate, or only have a vague idea, I’ll fill you in briefly. Basically, Internet service providers (ISPs) have been trying to find legal justification for giving variable rates of access to different users and sites on the web.
If ISPs are allowed to do that, they could also limit access or even block certain sites without telling anybody. This gets even more volatile when you consider that most people only have one option for non-dial-up Internet access in their area. Cable companies have traditionally struck deals with local governments to be the sole provider of services in an area, as long as they submit to certain regulations. For more info, go here.
If net neutrality is not protected, the whole concept of Internet marketing could be fundamentally changed for the worse. Despite all this, I hear relatively little from the social media, search engine optimization and Internet marketing community. Here’s why everyone should care:
1. Losing a level playing field makes your job impossible
Right now, if your website is clean, relevant, has great inbound links, and compelling content, you can rank well for at least some basic keywords. This gives even the little guys a chance to grow and develop a business online. But all the on-page and organic SEO in the world won’t do any good if the load time for your page is 30 minutes, or if it’s blocked all together. Imagine explaining to a client why despite all their best efforts, they still only get a trickle of visitors. Shaking your fist at the big ISPs won’t help you much then.
2. Google won’t save you
Google, the benevolent god of all SEO experts and Internet marketers, is not going to help you if the big ISPs squeeze out your site. Google is a friend of net neutrality and even has an information page dedicated to the cause, among other efforts. Still, they made everybody nervous a few months ago when the Wall Street Journal revealed Google had been discussing collocation of caching servers with ISPs. Don’t get me wrong, I still think Google’s on board with net neutrality. But if the ISPs get their way, Google will probably be just fine. You, however, won’t be.
3. This would affect businesses, not just free speech advocates
Normally the net neutrality debate focuses on free expression on the Internet, but it also comes down to cold hard cash. Businesses pay SEO experts and Internet marketers to get them traffic and conversions. What if legitimate businesses are shut down for no good reason? It’s already happened in Canada. In 2006, the Canadian Journal of Communication documented the case of Telus, one of the largest Canadian telecommunications firms. In 2005, a Telus employee started a website to help organize a strike. This is what happened:
Currently the Federal Trade Commission is thinking of picking up the slack of the FCC, which has seemed to drag its feet with guaranteeing net neutrality. Also, check out H.R. 5353, which was introduced in 2008. If you’re an SEO expert, Internet marketer, web designer, social media marketer or word of mouth marketer, you should call your representatives and tell them to support H.R. 5353. It will protect your ability to do what you do. Otherwise, you might want to see if the ISPs are hiring.
4. Don’t take my word for it, listen to a genuine rock band
This is a short clip of one of my favorite bands,
An anonymous poster dropped a bomb the other day on Reddit when he or she claimed to know another Redditor who was a paid propagandist for the Republican Party. The incendiary claim quickly gained more than 3,300 points, which, if you’re unfamiliar with Reddit, is a freaking boat load.
Here’s the claim:
In the comment section, the anonymous Redditor blames the conspiracy on word of mouth marketers, particularly members of a trade association called WOMMA (Word of Mouth Marketing Association). He said these groups get paid to troll Reddit, Digg and other social media sites. He also claimed to have a list of 1,400 usernames used by the clandestine manipulators.
It’s an awesome conspiracy theory, especially since WOMMA’s member list includes such notables as WalMart, The New York Times, Conde Nast, AARP, and even the Cheesecake Factory. (I knew their cheesecake was too good to be true.)
Now, I’m not one to dismiss an anonymous source on the Internet. I think the anonymous use of the web is an important part of free society. On the other hand, I’m not stupid either, so I checked it out.
As you can imagine, it wasn’t hard to reach a group called the Word of Mouth Marketing Association. They’re on Twitter, Facebook, and a number of other social media sites. I went the extra mile, however, and gave them an old-fashioned telephone call.
When I told a representative of WOMMA about the claims, she said, “That is totally against our ethics code. A member company that can be identified as being in violation of the ethics code, will have to go through a review process.”
She went on to say that the biggest part of WOMMA’s ethics code involves full disclosure. Since its inception in 2005, it has worked closely with the Federal Trade Commission, which has regulations about the use of testimonials and endorsements in advertising.
That made me feel a little bit better about the whole thing. If some groups are manipulating my beloved Reddit and my somewhat less beloved Digg, then at least I can take comfort knowing that those same groups could potentially get in a lot of trouble.
To that end, I sent a message to the anonymous Redditor to forward me the 1,400 usernames so I could start my own investigation. No word yet, but I’ll keep you updated. In the meantime, check out the blog from the poor guy who was implicated in all of this. It has the insincere and humorous title of “The Day I Was Outed As A Republican Operative.”
Conspiracy theory or not, I maintain that social media is what we make of it. So what if the Republican Party has hired a team of Reddit monkeys to down vote any liberal stories? If you disagree, get in there an up vote it. If you don’t participate in the discussion, then you’re at least partially complicit with the conspiracy. That is, if one exists at all.
Online video is becoming more and more important. From a search engine optimization standpoint, it can improve your bounce rate, keep people on your site longer, and, if used correctly, greatly improve conversion. The problem with it traditionally has been that it’s hard for search engines to crawl.
Search engines can only read text, so videos, pictures and audio will be invisible unless you do something to help. Google has been working with audio indexing to overcome this problem. It’s an exciting experiment and the initial results look good.
At Google Audio Indexing, thousands of video clips from news organizations have been transcribed. You can find videos by keywords and you can even search within the video. It’s really fun.
But I wonder if Google can apply audio indexing to the entire webiverse of video. In general, the mainstream news media has better diction than the rest of the unwashed masses. I wonder if it’s ready for a broader application. One thing that makes me think it’s not ready is Google Voice, a new service that will transcribe your voice mail for you. Transcribing voice mail is definitely trickier than indexing a news cast. As you can imagine, it doesn’t work as well.
Yesterday, on Reddit, somebody had this fun idea: “Anyone want to help me test the Google Voice transcript capabilities? 614-429-4365 - You leave message and I’ll cut and paste what Google Voice thinks you said in the comments.”
The following is the number one comment. See if you can recognize it:
“now this is the story all about hall my michael sweet turned upside down on i’d like to take a minute just sits right there on i don’t have the i like to come look at what time call bye bye in west philadelphia born and raised on the plane now where i spent most mondays shooting out nice let you know who will students be able to side of the school wanna couple of guys said what up in the good stuff and making traveling monday but i got a lot of fun come on the scanner that said you moving with your again okay bye bye”
If you read the rest of the thread, you’ll notice that Google also has a very hard time transcribing swear words.
So, while I’m really excited about what Google is doing in the audio indexing department, I’m not going to expect reliable audio indexing and video search for the entire web any time soon.
In the meantime, to make sure you have video that is search engine optimized, take the following steps:
1. Have a transcript embedded in the flash player, or directly under the video.
2. Have one video element per page.
3. Create a video sitemap and submit it to Google using their webmaster tools.
4. In the event of a general application of audio indexing, speak slowly and clearly in your videos and avoid the four-letter words. By the way, this tip also helps when making 911 calls. Have fun optimizing your video.
Last week, one of our clients’ sites was hacked. In hidden text on the front page, they had links for all sorts of things from prescription drugs to pay day loans. Even though we didn’t build the site, our expert web team was able to track down the problem and put a stop to it. I was fascinated about who would do something like that, so I decided to find out.
Apparently, somebody in Amsterdam was working for a group in Russia that hacked the site and sent links to a broad set of websites. It looks as if the whole set up was to get the hacker’s sites better page rank from Google.
Google judges a web page’s authority and authenticity based on page rank, which it assigns to every page based largely on what links it has from other, more established web pages. Page rank is essentially how much Google trusts a page.
Working in search engine optimization and web design, we often hear of people using “black hat” techniques to manipulate their page rank, but I’ve never run into anyone who actually did that. So, I decided to call them up and find out what they were thinking.
Did they know what was going on? Or did they just hire an SEO expert and suddenly their page rank shot up? I scoured the list of sites and left out the ones that seemed shady from the get-go. Prescription drugs, online gambling, pay day loans, dating services, all fell in the “scum bag” category for me. But a few sites stuck out as being possibly innocent.
One was TheFirstAidKits.com, which has an address and phone number in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It has a page rank of 4, which is pretty good. They also appeared to be selling real first aid kits. So I called up their customer service number, told them that I was writing a blog entry for Advent Creative in Utah, and then asked if they knew how their link got on our client’s site.
The woman on the phone was nice, and said she had no clue about any of it. She said the webmaster was unavailable and she didn’t know if anybody had recently hired an SEO or search engine marketing company. I did notice, however, that she had a Russian accent. So I checked out the site’s registration. It turns out it belongs to some guy in Moscow.
Now, just because it’s a Russian site doesn’t mean that they were complicit with the hack. They still might have innocently signed on with an SEO “expert” who then broke onto our client’s site. In fact, one of the clandestine links was to a Russion SEO company.
The next site was more interesting. It’s called SamsonBlinded.org, a fiercely Zionist website with a respectable page rank of 5. They advocate a “Machiavellian” approach to the Middle East conflict, which boils down to essentially destroying or enslaving all the Palestinians. Let’s just say that this isn’t a website that most sane people would link to. What’s funny about this site is they have a press release page where they brag about their connections to hackers. I also found it hilarious when they complained about how Google Adwords had recently rejected one of their ads for strong political language.
Here is what they wanted to run:
Down with moralizing
Any means are good against terror
Read Shoher’s new book - free on web
As a Qualified Google Advertising Professional, I could have told them that the ad wasn’t going to fly. Oh well.
Here’s the point:
Black hat search engine marketing and search engine optimization may work in the short term, but never for the long term. I have a friend at Google and he’s a freaking genius. They’re all geniuses. Sooner or later, they’re going to figure out all the scams. The only long term strategy for SEO and SEM is to make a great site, share it with great people, and to constantly provide good, relevant content. Still, my hat’s off to those scrappy hackers who keep trying, just the same.
Then, on March 12, police raid his home, handcuff his girlfriend, who was the only one home at the time, and confiscate his computers and hard drives. They even break into a safe and take his back up hard drive. The warrant for the search and seizure cited “computer tampering with the intent to harass.” Is that even a real law?
Depending on whom you ask, anonymous blogging is either a God-given right that the founding fathers wisely protected in the Constitution, or it is a modern evil akin to meth addiction, gang violence, and Dancing with the Stars.
The subject is pretty important to me since my day job entails helping clients set up and maintain their blogs and my after hours obsession is the First Amendment. Social media, and blogs in particular, are still new enough that not everyone knows how to react to them properly.
Over the past month or two, I’ve collected several examples of poor reactions to anonymous bloggers from governments, police departments, and even a church. These stories might enrage you for several reasons, but it’s instructive to see how ephemeral Internet privacy and anonymity is.
Hundreds of Bloggers Arrested in Asia
The BBC reported last June that since 2003, 64 bloggers have been arrested in China and as many as 344 in Burma. Prison sentences in China ranged from 15 months to eight years. I don’t even know what’s happening to the Burmese bloggers. The point is: If you’re going to blog anonymously about controversial issues, do it in the United States. Even then, you could still run into problems.
Phoenix Police Raid Blogger’s Home
I first read about this story on the great blog Photography is Not a Crime by Carlos Miller. I’m still amazed this happened in the United States.
Basically, this blogger was mad at the Phoenix police because of the way they handled harassment charges from his ex-wife (He was eventually acquitted). So, he starts a blog, Bad Phoenix Cops, and rips them apart online. Soon, he has 50 to 100 retired police officers feeding him information on corruption and mismanagement. He writes about it.
The blogger, Jeff Pataky, bought himself a new laptop and continues to blog. But it’s not just police departments that can cause grief for a blogger, politicians do a good job as well.
Mudflats blogger outed by Alaskan State Representative
Mudflats became one of the most popular political blogs during the 2008 election because of her scathing criticisms of fellow Alaskan and vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin. But her problems arose when she criticized a Democratic state representative Mike Doogan, who then went on a crusade to out her. He eventually did, and you can read her name here if you want, although it was sort of anticlimactic for me.
Mudflats chose to remain anonymous and has never divulged why, although she lists several good possible reasons on her blog. She is also amazed that an elected representative would be so obsessed that he would track her down and then publish her name to his constituents.
She goes on to point out that even Ben Franklin published items anonymously under the name Mrs. Silence Dogood. I would have to point out, however, that he too was outed against his will by his brother. But it’s not just police and politicians who aren’t happy with anonymous bloggers, even a church is getting in on the action.
Cops may have outed blogger to the First Baptist Church of Jacksonville
In 2007, Thomas Rich, anonymous no more, thought his megachurch was raising more money than it needed. He still wanted to attend the church, but he felt he needed to raise some important issues about the finances. So, he started blogging anonymously. The church was not happy. According to the Florida Times-Union’s website, the Rev. John Blout called a police officer, who also attended the church, and asked him to investigate. The police officer opened an investigation and subpoenaed Google and Comcast for all the information on Rich. He eventually dropped the investigation, but somehow, Rich’s name ended up getting back to Rev. Blout.
Long story short, Rich gets kicked out of the church, and is now suing the sheriff’s office and the state attorney’s office.
Take Home Message
Groups like the Electron Frontier Foundation are working to secure rights for anonymous bloggers, but there is never a guarantee. The bottom line is that when you are using blogs or social media, you are never anonymous. Everything you post can and will be held against you at some point in time. I hope this doesn’t have a chilling effect on free expression, but I also don’t want people to operate their blogs with a false sense of security. In the end, there is no such thing as an anonymous blogger.
Last week, Nielsen Online released some data about Twitter’s less than impressive retention rate. While the micro-blogging social media site has been bathing in media attention for it’s spectacular growth, Neilson’s David Martin wonders if it isn’t all just a fad.
Currently, about 60 percent of new Twitter users do not come back the next month. Martin projects that with that poor performance, Twitter will never be able to reach more than 10 percent of Internet users. Of course having a 10 percent Internet reach is nothing to turn your nose up at, but I still wonder if Neilson is selling Twitter short.
By his own admission, Martin’s conclusions might be a bit premature. Every time we discover a new way to interact on the web and on social media, it takes a certain amount of time to understand what it all means.
Using Twitter, I asked people what they thought about the low retention rate. Apparently many people have had a common experience that readily explains the trend of people signing up and then not returning the next month. It just takes a month or two for people to “get” Twitter.
For example, when a friend, Jenny Johnson (@cheekyandswank), told me I should join Twtter, I did happily. Unfortunately, I didn’t get it right away, so I stopped. About two months later, I came back to it and understood more fully what the possibilities were. I’ve been hooked ever since.
I’m not alone. @ryansmiller wrote: “Took a while to get into Twitter & I joined in ‘07. Users need a breakthrough moment where they “get it” to become regulars.” And @drinklibslc referred me to this article in PC World in which Robert Strohmeyer (@robertstrohmeyer) writes:
“I typed my first tweet at 2:45 PM on March 15, 2007, punched in six more the following day, and then took three months off before coming back. And even after returning to Twitter that July, I didn’t really realize what the service could do for me beyond broadcasting my latest blog posts to a modest circle of my friends and colleagues. So it went for another year or so before I had that ah-ha moment that opened the service up to me.”
Admittedly, all this is anecdotal and may or may not hold true for the majority of Twitter users and Twitter quitters. Still, it seems that Twitter has an unusually long gap between when people start using it and when they start understanding it and feeling comfortable with it. Considering that, it’s probably too early to tell if Twitter is a fad or not, and it’s too early to start projecting it’s potential Internet reach. My guess is that Twitter will be around for a long time in some form or another, but we’ll have to wait and see.
Wanna be friends?